This coming season, the Tomales High School football team will play games with eight men on each side of the ball instead of the traditional 11. The football program failed to sign up enough players to field a junior varsity team last year, forcing most of the varsity team’s starters to double on both offense and defense, every down.
According to administrators, the declining participation in the program mirrors declining enrollment at the school.
Though all Shoreline Unified School District’s schools have faced dramatic drops in enrollment, at Tomales High the drop is particularly acute, with a loss of 50 students—nearly a quarter of the student body—since 2005.
“Enrollment has everything to do with this,” said principal Adam Jennings. “Fewer kids means fewer players.”
The bucket tipped for the Tomales Braves during a home game against their rivals, the St. Vincent De Paul Mustangs. The Braves struck first with a touchdown on a 6-play, 43-yard drive, but opponents blew away an exhausted squad from there on out, allowing for 40 unanswered points.
“To me, it was clear that we were asking too much of our kids,” Mr. Jennings said. “Our kids are just plain sore and tired at the end of the season.”
Though no one has been seriously injured as a result of playing through fatigue, athletes’ health was part of the reason for switching to an eight-man team, Mr. Jennings said. But the program’s ability to be competitive without a junior varsity, with fewer players and with no signs that enrollment will increase any time soon was another major factor.
In recent years, football has had to compete with soccer for eligible male athletes. Soccer’s popularity at Tomales has been on the rise since 2012, when the sport did not have enough players to field a team. Since then, male student-athletes have slowly stocked the soccer team.
“They basically picked up their grades,” said Mr. Jennings, explaining how improved grades across the board allowed more students to become academically eligible to participate in soccer. The rise of soccer and the decline of football, he added, is part of the natural ebb and flow of student interests.
The Braves football program has a long history of winning—which makes the drop to eight-man play even tougher for the school to stomach. Over the last two decades, the team has won three North Coast Section championships; during one span, it won the North Central League II title six seasons in a row.
Head coach Leon Feliciano, who helmed the team’s success for 19 years, has mixed feelings about the change to eight-man ball.
“It’s tough because we’ve had such a great tradition,” said Mr. Feliciano, who is retiring at the end of the year. “We’re one of the smaller schools, but that’s always been part of our reputation. A small group of tough kids.”
Mr. Feliciano coached the team when stadium lights were installed in 2008 and the team started playing games on Friday nights, the traditional time for high school football across the country. Previously, games were played on Saturday afternoons, a difficult time to attract attendees; Friday night lights brought out fans in droves, creating even more buzz around the Braves.
“It magnified the whole experience,” Mr. Feliciano said. “There’s something about Friday night football that’s magical for high schools.”
It is unclear how the new eight-man format will affect attendance numbers, which can reach as many as 500 fans—far more than the school’s student population—on big game nights. But with backing from the school’s booster club, Mr. Jennings is confident that the eight-man scenario is the best way to keep the tradition of Tomales football intact.
“We see this as a way to stay competitive and have both varsity and junior varsity teams,” he said. “Unless our enrollment jumps up where it was [10 years ago], we may find that having two robust eight-man teams would be better for us.”
Tomales High is not the only team in the league switching to eight-man play. In fact, the entire four-school N.C.L. II—made up of Tomales, St. Vincent, Calistoga and Upper Lake High Schools—will be dissolved. Calistoga and Upper Lake will join Tomales in the eight-man N.C.L. III.
Both teams cited low numbers in junior varsity as the main reason for the move. (St. Vincent will play 11-man football in the Bay League.)
The eight-man format will bring other changes. Offense and defense lines will be reduced by two positions, from five linemen to three, leaving one more position to be cut at the fullback, tight end, safety or linebacker positions.
The field will also be squeezed to an 80-by-40-yard boundary. Instead of the standard 100-by-50-yard field, with one team driving toward one end zone and the other team driving for the other, both teams will start at the same 40-yard line and drive toward the same end zone.
And the question of playoffs is still up in the air. Currently, the top four out of 10 teams in the eight-man league will play two “Bowl Game” playoff matches, but Tomales and Calistoga—among other eight-man schools—are calling for a more regular playoff tournament in the future.
“There are plenty of teams,” said John McGurke, Tomales High’s athletics director. “We are holding out hope that the [school federation] organizes playoffs, but it might start the season after next.”
Tomales administrators agree that the eight-man format appears awkward, and that it will take time for the Braves to
adjust.
But what matters most, Mr. Feliciano said, is that the kids keep playing.
“The bottom line is, it’s football,” he said. “It’ll still be football. And Tomales will still be competitive. It’ll live on.”